Page 105 - The Kite Runner

94 Khaled Hosseini

three-quarters of the four hundred–plus Kakas and Khalas who
were going to bring me gifts and congratulate me for having lived
to thirteen. Then I realized they weren’t really coming for me. It
was my birthday, but I knew who the real star of the show was.
For days, the house was teeming with Baba’s hired help. There
was Salahuddin the butcher, who showed up with a calf and two
sheep in tow, refusing payment for any of the three. He slaugh-
tered the animals himself in the yard by a poplar tree. “Blood is
good for the tree,” I remember him saying as the grass around the
poplar soaked red. Men I didn’t know climbed the oak trees with
coils of small electric bulbs and meters of extension cords. Others
set up dozens of tables in the yard, spread a tablecloth on each.
The night before the big party Baba’s friend Del-Muhammad,
who owned a kabob house in Shar-e-Nau, came to the house with
his bags of spices. Like the butcher, Del-Muhammad—or Dello,
as Baba called him—refused payment for his services. He said
Baba had done enough for his family already. It was Rahim Khan
who whispered to me, as Dello marinated the meat, that Baba had
lent Dello the money to open his restaurant. Baba had refused
repayment until Dello had shown up one day in our driveway in a
Benz and insisted he wouldn’t leave until Baba took his money.
I guess in most ways, or at least in the ways in which parties
are judged, my birthday bash was a huge success. I’d never seen
the house so packed. Guests with drinks in hand were chatting in
the hallways, smoking on the stairs, leaning against doorways.
They sat where they found space, on kitchen counters, in the
foyer, even under the stairwell. In the backyard, they mingled
under the glow of blue, red, and green lights winking in the trees,
their faces illuminated by the light of kerosene torches propped
everywhere. Baba had had a stage built on the balcony that over-
looked the garden and planted speakers throughout the yard.